Friday, October 31, 2014

The Lord vs the Goddess

On February 26, I was re-imagining at Mass while listening to the first reading—Isaiah 49: 15:

Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!

In the past, when I heard passages like this I thought,

Lovely, God described in feminine terms!

As I listened this time, I thought about the Greek myth I wrote about in the previous post. The myth has the Goddess Athena springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus, so that a male god usurps an exclusively feminine faculty. On the basis of this myth, the Greek dramatist Aeschylus justifies matricide (Scroll down to previous post for the story).

With this in mind, I thought to myself about the Isaiah passage:

It’s lovely, except that the Lord is speaking. No one imagines a female lord.

The Judaeo/Christian Lord robs females of their power as Zeus does by his faux birthing of Athena because the Lord never is referred to as “She.” Pronouns tell us what’s wrong with this and many such scriptural passages. When He claims feminine powers, He utterly negates female worth.

Margaret Wertheim: My mother’s Catholicism has been one of the greatest and deepest influences on everything I do.
Tippett: But you also are atheist, is that correct?
Wertheim: [I do not] believe in the existence of God in the Catholic sense. [But] I want to say very publicly I’m not an atheist. . . .
I’m very, very saddened by the fact that militant atheism has become [sic] so to the fore of our society. I think it’s destructive and unhelpful. And I don’t think it does science any service.

I agree and know atheists who agree.

The word “militant” stood out during the interview and came to me in church. I thought,

The Bible contains militant patriarchy.

Wertheim used “militant” to describe atheists belligerently attacking a belief system—quite different from the Isaiah reading about a mother’s love. But the Zeus-birthed-Athena myth and the-Lord-mothers-better-than-a-mother myth both insidiously undermined the belief system in pre-historic times when God was imagined to be female.

Knowing history enlightens the present. Mater Magna, the Great Mother in pre-history embodied feminine powers. If Christianity is to stop being a patriarchal oppressor, we need to pray to Her as well as to Him.

The Lord v. the Goddess October 31, 2014Whenever
I hear of people reading the Bible, I wonder if they read Old Testament texts portraying
the Lord in competition with the Goddess and punishing those who worship Her.
It’s hard not to despise this Lord as a petty, vindictive, unlikeable guy.

Much
is made of monotheism in our religious tradition. It is said to show the
superiority of our religion over the polytheism of others, but it is based on a
misunderstanding. Just as the male image of the Holy One possesses many names,
the female one has a variety of names. In the Bible She is named El Shaddai,
Asherah, Ashtoreth, Astarte, and Anath. Various names for what we call “God” can
lead to greater understanding that images of “God” are merely images and not
the reality itself.

In
the following passages, the Lord looks more like a tribal god or mascot than “God”
(quotations
from the NAB):

Judges
2: 13. The Israelites abandoned worship of the Lord and served Ashtoreth and
Baal. Then “the anger of the Lord flared up against Israel, and he delivered them
over to plunderers who despoiled them.”

Judges
3: 7. Because the Israelites offended the Lord by serving Baal and Asherah,
“the anger of the Lord flared up against them and he allowed them to fall into
the power of [their enemies].

In First
Samuel 7: 4, a similar tale is told, and the pattern appears in numerous other
books.

In
First Kings 15: 11-14, we read that a king of Judah “pleased the Lord” by
destroying sacred objects devoted to Asherah. This also is a common refrain in
the historical books of the Bible. Fortunately, our morality has evolved beyond
the Lord’s jealous code. No matter how foolish the religious objects of others seem
to us, we respect them.

Second
Kings 23 details the destruction of all traces of Goddess-worship in the temple
and the countryside by a king in favor with the Lord. Yet, “the Lord did not
desist from his fiercely burning anger against Judah” (2 Kgs 23: 26). What
follows is the fall of Jerusalem to the king of Babylon and deportations of
Judeans to Babylon—the Babylonean Exile.

Raphael
Patai found 40 references to Asherah in the historical books of the Bible, most
of them referring to Asherim, which
scholars think were carved wooden poles in shrines to the Goddess. They were
everywhere, on every hill, inciting the vengeance of the Lord. In these stories
“Evil in the sight of the Lord” really means competition for Him.

Of
course, the texts do not represent “God”; they were written by Israelite
priests intent on suppressing worship different from their own prescriptions.
Their image of a jealous lord violates our image of what we call “God” today—a
loving, non-judgmental force guiding all peoples toward goodness.

The
Israelite priests largely failed in their campaign. Raphael Patai concludes
that, for almost two-thirds of the 370 years during which Solomon's Temple
stood in Jerusalem, the statue of Asherah was present in the Temple and she was
worshiped by the king, the court and the priesthood.

In
Jeremiah 44:16-19, women tell us why She gave good competition to Him:

We will not listen to what you say in the name of the
Lord. Rather will we continue doing what we had proposed; we will burn incense
to the Queen of Heaven and pour out libations to Her, as we and our fathers,
our kings and princes have done in the cities of Judah and the streets of
Jerusalem.

Then we had enough food to eat and we were well off;
we suffered no misfortune. But since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of
Heaven and pouring out libations to Her, we are in need of everything and are
being destroyed by the sword and by hunger.

First
Kings 11 tells what happened because King Solomon had 700 wives of royal rank
and 300 concubines. These foreign women turned Solomon’s heart away from the
Lord and toward Astarte, and Solomon built sacred shrines honoring the Goddess.
The Lord punished him—for serving Astarte, not for polygamy—by taking away most
of Solomon’s kingdom and raising up an adversary to him.

Earlier
Solomon’s father, David, had massacred all the men of this adversary.

Genocide
stalks the Bible—my subject next time.

November 21, 2014 Genocide in the Bible

Jews,
Christians, and Muslims do not talk about genocide in the Bible, although
educated religious are well aware of it. I think we should stop keeping it a
secret known only to a few. My religious friends who already know this don’t
like to be reminded, but I think it’s important to put the issue forward to check Christian arrogance and apathy.

The
biggest scandal in biblical genocide is that “the Lord” commands the genocide.
He does not fit our idea of God, but he still inhabits scripture readings in
our churches.

The
Lord said to Moses: “. . . I have given him into your hand, with all his people
and his land. So they killed him, his sons, and all his people, until there was
no survivor left; and they took possession of his land.

Numbers
21: 34-35(RSV
translation)

This kind of
slaughter becomes a habit. In another passage, the Israelites
report that they followed
instructions given to Moses by the god called “the Lord”:

. .
. we utterly destroyed [the kingdom of Og], as we had done to King Sihon of
Heshbon, in each city utterly destroying men, women, and children.

Deuteronomy
3:6

Biblical atrocities do not stop with killing people, as this next passage shows. “The Lord” spoke to Moses:

When
you cross over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you shall drive out all the
inhabitants of the land before you; destroy all their figured stones, destroy
all their cast images, and demolish all their high places.

Numbers
33: 50-52

To
appreciate this we have to imagine an enemy destroying all our churches, all
our statues and other holy objects. The god called “The Lord” makes sure they
carry out his orders:

. .
. if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then
those whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your
sides; they shall trouble you in the land where you are settling.

And
I will do to you as I thought to do to them. (Numbers 33: 55)

Joshua,
who succeeded Moses as leader of the Israelites, presided over more butchering.

The
total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand—all
the people of Ai.

Joshua
8:24

More
genocide commanded by the lord occurs in Deuteronomy chapters 7, 12, 20 (“you
must not let anything that breathes remain alive”), Joshua 6, 10 (“. . . utterly
destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded”), and 11. I quit
searching for passages showing the god commanding genocide but ran into many exposing his perverted sexual morality. See especially Numbers 31. Check out these verses, which introduce a sexist
horror commanded by “the Lord”:

Now,
therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has
known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a
man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.

Numbers
31: 7-8,17-18

The
terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria could take lessons from this lord. Another outrageous passage occurs in Dt 22:

If .
. . evidence of the young woman’s virginity was not found, . . . the men of her
town shall stone her to death, because she committed a disgraceful act . . .

We
know the likely story. The young woman who lost her virginity likely was raped.
From news of tribal practices in the Middle East today, we know many women are
victims punished for the acts of their assailants.

Come to think of it, to a
lesser extent, this happens to college students today. They are sexually
molested, but their assailants go free and the legal system blames and shames the victims. Come to think further, Catholic bishops did the same thing. This occurred to me after I had finished posting. I write this now in an edit.

We are
told that certain people in history read and studied the Bible, even memorized
large swaths of it. That statement is not followed by dismay over some of its
contents. I don’t understand it.

Here
I have pointed to only a tiny portion of the loathsome passages. I present them
to challenge my fellow Christians who think our religion is superior to other
religions, as our childhood faith trained us to think. It is not. Jesus of
Nazareth left us a treasure of spiritual counsel. It does not insult him to tell
the truth about our religion.

At its
beginning, our tradition beat its rivals, the religions around it. It won the
power to tell its side of the story as the normative one. Because its symbols
saturated the Western world, they provided primary access to the Inner
Realm. Ours is a fine religion. It does what all religions are good
at—providing images for humans to think about inner truths. When it and any
religion insists that its way is the only good way, that’s when it’s
dangerous.We see how dangerous in these
stories about genocide in the Bible.************************Two comments propel me to add this note:

Both
noted that all genocide examples are from the Old Testament, and isn’t the New
Testament more gentle and civil?

Correct. The New Testament IS gentler, more humanist. Most humanist and loving of
all are Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings, which focus on the Divine Reign within each
human person. One of the responses, however, also mentioned the Crusades, the Inquisition,
the burning of witches and heretics.

As
expressed above, institutional religion’s ideas cannot be trusted as coming
from what we call God.

COMMENT.

Anonymous
said...

Ms. Clancy, I think you would agree that your statement "Most humanist
and loving of all are Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings, which focus on the
Divine Reign within each human person" might more accurately be worded
as "Most humanist and loving of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are
those that focus on the Divine Reign within each person." Those, of
course, are only part of the teachings attributed to Jesus of the New
Testament. He is also presented as believing that the way to heaven is
narrow, that few will make it, and that the majority of humans will
suffer eternally in Hell.
An Old Testament god who orders the death or
enslavement of hundreds of thousands of people is an awful character,
but doesn't threaten hell; far worse is a god (or god/man) presented as
approving--even arranging--the eternal torture of most of humanity.
That's the N.T.'s Jesus, unless you have a convincing argument that such
beliefs were falsely attributed to him in Gospel writings (which I
would read with interest).

November 15, 2014 Tony Flannery

Thank
you to Larry Schug for sending this poem written in New Mexico, thinking it could
go with my post, “The Lord vs the Goddess.” I agree.

Encounter with a Collared Lizard

A collared lizard,

hardly larger than
a dragonfly,

crosses our path,
stops to sun itself

on a limestone
rock in a dry stream bed,

a meeting of
species

that seems
serendipitous, if not predestined,

even in the vast
desert of space and time,

as if my human
life is no accident,

but some sort of
blessing,

not from the God
who lives in churches,

demanding worship
and sacrifice,

but from the
goddess of small places and little lives,

the goddess who
can’t wipe the smile from her face.

Redemptorist Fr. Tony Flannery, founder of the
Association of Catholic Priests has been a popular writer and speaker in
Ireland and has publicly questioned
official church teaching on celibacy for priests, contraception, homosexuality
and women's ordination.

He is touring our country and met with 30 fellow
dissidents in St. Cloud two weeks ago. The discussion was exhilarating, as
indignant views were aired. Few persons there remained silent the whole
while.Malcolm Nazareth nailed the whole
set of problems in Catholicism under patriarchy—assigning all power to an
exclusive group of white males. Referring to texts edited by Paula S. Rothenberg, Malcolm writes,

US culture and civilization is summed up in the term
"Whiteness" or ‘historical, systematic, structural race-based
superiority.’ The roots of racism, sexism, as well as homophobia are in the
cult of masculinity.

By praying exclusively to male lords, Christianity
and Islam have damaged the spiritual imagination of most people on the planet. If
we would pray to God our Mother as well as Father, we would break this pattern
in our consciousness that encourages people to demean women. It leads to sexism,
racism, clericalism, colonialism, and homophobia—all oppressive systems.

There is a clear line from worship of male gods to all
forms of gender violence. The simple elimination of the word “Lord” in our
prayers would break this training and transform the dominant, perverted image
of God in our Western religions. I beg priests to lead with courage.

As Tony Flannery was about to leave he said we were
even more radical than he. I hope we radicalized him beyond talking about
Catholic sexual teachings, the future of ministry, and the problem with
infallibility. I gave him a copy of my God
Is Not Three Guys in the Sky.

Change of topic:

I had never seen the movie or read The lost Child of PhilomenaLee, an Irish woman who spent 50 years searching
for long-lost son. Her journey ends in the exposure of cruelty in a monastery trained
in perverted Catholic sexual doctrine. Having now seen the superb movie, I
speculate that it’s one of those rare movies that measure up to the book.

It happens that an article in the latest NCR echoes
the theme in Philomena: babies inChile were stolen and sold to well-off families.

I
asked Malcolm to write a post for this blog, and I haven’t forgotten my promise
to write about genocide in the Bible. COMMENT:

Chris said...

Hi Jeanette,

Let me first say with absolute sincerity that I am
not posting here for the purpose of trolling. Whenever I visit your
blog, I find myself totally perplexed. It seems to me that your engaging
in a kind of idolatry- an idolatry of, well, unconsciousness. What your
unconscious of is that your subjectivist/relativist ideology precedes
your faith and apparently everything else .

Moreover, most of
the causes that you so fervently pursue are, themselves, ideals that
have their source in that very religion/civilization that you so
strenuously object to. What spiritual universe, other than the West, do
we even find the recognition of things like racism and sexism in the
first place?

2 comments:

Absolutely. These actions of the god of the Hebrew Bible make it clear that this mascot god (your appropriate image of him) and his shenanigans are utterly risible. The mascot is not even an adult male. It's an immature and spoiled teenaged male. It's a masculine figure that finds its true identity in repudiating anything and everything that bears resemblance to woman. The mascot-god embodies many of the forms of masculinity that have become part and parcel of the Christian beliefs and practices of the first two millennia. Not surprisingly, respect for the Goddess was all but destroyed. (In some cases, Marian devotion came in by the back door to compensate for the missing Goddess.) Those who finalized the NT canon early in the 5th century CE also accepted the Hebrew Bible and its problematic legacy of the cult of masculinity as a prime source of the legitimate antecedents of their faith. Hence this intolerant, cruel, petty, narcissistic mascot-god is what the "churchianity" of the first millenium also ingested as part of its belief system. In the process, the female principle of divinity was crushed, demolished, repudiated, and done away with in the thinking and practices of churches most everywhere. In our day, feminist theology, womanist theology, the mujieristas and similar theological movements from other regions of the world have been laboring hard to revive our long lost historical memory of what the Jesus movement and the followers of the historical Jesus would have been and could have become had they kept the Goddess firmly in place. Thank you for challenging us to rethink the "Lording" of Christian theology and some of its distorted, abominable forms which have led us via this cult of masculinity to so much violence, war, rapaciousness, environmental destruction, racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and the rest of the isms that plague the western world. These abominations and distortions make explicit what is rotten in the heart and mind of Christian churches and also in those western cultures and civilizations which came under the influence of Jewish and Christian patriarchy. Through globalization processes, what hit the fan centuries and millennia ago in the west has been spread to the farthest corners of the earth.

Absolutely. These actions of the god of the Hebrew Bible make it clear that this "mascot god" (your appropriate image of him) and his shenanigans are utterly risible. The mascot is not even an adult male. It's an immature and spoiled teenaged male. It's a masculine figure that finds its true(!) identity in repudiating anything and everything that bears resemblance to woman. The mascot-god embodies many of the forms of masculinity that have become part and parcel of the Christian beliefs and practices of the first two millennia. Not surprisingly, in the process, respect for the Goddess was all but destroyed. (In some cases, Marian devotion came in by the back door to compensate for the missing Goddess.) Those who finalized the NT canon early in the 5th century CE also accepted the Hebrew Bible and its problematic legacy of the cult of masculinity as a prime source of the legitimate antecedents of their faith. Hence this intolerant, cruel, petty, narcissistic mascot-god is what the "churchianity" of the first millenium also ingested as part of its belief system. In the process, the female principle of divinity was crushed, demolished, repudiated, and done away with in the thinking and practices of churches most everywhere. In our day, feminist theology, womanist theology, the mujieristas and similar theological movements from other regions of the world have been laboring hard to revive our long lost historical memory of what the Jesus movement and the followers of the historical Jesus would have been and could have become had they kept the Goddess firmly in place. Thank you for challenging us to rethink the "Lording" of Christian theology and some of its distorted, abominable forms which have led us via this cult of masculinity to so much violence, war, rapaciousness, environmental destruction, racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and the rest of the isms that plague the western world. These abominations and distortions make explicit what is rotten in the heart and mind of Christian churches and also in those western cultures and civilizations which came under the influence of Jewish and Christian patriarchy. Through globalization processes, what hit the fan centuries and millennia ago in the west has been spread to the farthest corners of the earth in the name of Jesus Christ. Not surprising at all today that many thinking people today worldwide have rejecting Jesus Christ and his churches and finding the divine in spiritualities that are closer to nature and to the inclusive feminine principle.

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In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This is a two-edged challenge. It invites believers to rethink their dogmas, and it challenges people without faith to rethink their certainty that everything religious is bunk.